The hiatus in content began with the best of intentions. I said to myself “It’s my birthday celebration. I deserve a day off” and “I’ve a little bit of a headache. I don’t want it to become a migraine.” Then it became those weaselly words “It’s really for everyone else’s sake I’m not doing it. They must be getting sick of the same old stuff, day in day out.” Soon after that, it was “Well, I don’t really know what to write.” By the end of the week, it was “At this time of the morning? You must be joking.”

Despite all these fantastic reasons, I noticed myself getting ratty. I noticed my temper fraying. With each passing day, I felt the normally calm and sanguine moods which I have been enjoying, almost since Lent, ebbing away, and being replaced with something … half full? Something that wasn’t all there, but was instead bad-tempered and antisocial, with a barely concealed anger just under the surface. Mostly this boiled to the surface as energy. Sheer, unbridled, uncontrollable energy.

To put it basically, Sam Vimes was right: “Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.” This is the valve on my emotion. Within these pages I can be the me that most of you see, but that I refuse to let out into the world so often. Without the words streaming from my soul, regardless of what they are, everything goes a bit manky inside. The spring stagnates. I spent much of yesterday scribbling words in a little book. Meaningless words – mostly my own name, and ideas and thoughts, but just having the flow helped. I remembered the Rules, and that the Rules are there for a reason.

Here’s where I’m going to sound like I should probably be institutionalised. If that will distress you, look away now. I need rules. I need a framework on which to hang everything else that being good and human entails. so I came up with rules that worked, and then worked with them. And whenever I fall down, when I get back up and dust myself off, I look at what happened, and often I realise that it happened because I relaxed the Rules.

Always write. Writing maintains an emotional honesty, and stops all the words filling me up to the extent that I explode. Last thing anyone wants is to be sat there picking loose conjugations out of their hair. If I need a drink, I don’t get one. Simple. If I go out and I can take it or leave it, take it I shall. But if I need it, if every fibre in my being is screaming for some kind of chemical stimulant, I think it can stay on the shelf. Rule three there was “No excuses”. That was the rule that fell over this time, taking with it a small section of the other Rules.

But I’m here still. I survive, and I fight on. I live to write another day. And I’m back to getting up at insane o’clock in the morning.

Sigh… Good Morning.